The edtech environment has seen many changes over the past 10 years, of course not only due to technological developments (in particular the mobile environment and the social web) but the impact of political and funding changes – with the fall-out of the Brexit referendum still to be fully felt.

Blogs which have been published over that period can provide a useful record of the changes in the environment. On this anniversary of this blog I will provide some links which have sought to document developments described on this blog.

I was aware from the start of the importance of blogs as an historical record, rather than simply transient reflections. I therefore published a series of posts on anniversaries of the launch of the blog during the time I was employed at UKOLN:

The First Year Of The UK Web Focus Blog: 1 Nov 2007 which described how the blog took about 6 months to reach a stable readership plateau of ~4,200 visits per month and averaged about 4 comments per post.

Fourth Anniversary of this Blog – Feedback Invited: 1 Nov 2010 which summarised the main purposes of the blog “The use of the blog as an open notebook was partly for my own benefit: the writing process has helped me to reflect on my thoughts as well as helping me to ensure that I will be able to revisit the ideas in the future – indeed many ideas initially described on the blog have subsequently been reused in my talks and my papers. The open approach using this blog has also provided an opportunity for others to comment on the thoughts and ideas, which again has helped me in developing these ideas.“

The blog continued to be published after leaving UKOLN (incidentally Friday marked the 20th anniversary of starting work at UKOLN so this blog provides a useful summary of a significant proportion of my time advising the UK’s higher educations sector on web developments). During the transition from UKOLN to initially working at Cetis and then as an independent consultant the blog was migrated from ukwebfocus.wordpress.com to ukwebfocus.com. Much less time was spent on writing blog posts as I no longer had responsibilities for advising the sector. However occasional posts are still published, with the focus now on supporting the annual IWMW event (the Institutional Web Management Workshop which also celebrated its 20th anniversary earlier this year), and my continued interests in digital preservation, use of Cloud services and continued use of online services after leaving one’s host institution (an area which I feel will grow in importance once the higher education sector feels the full impact of Brexit 🙂